Tutor-mania I’m proud to be a ‘pushy’ parent
Extra tuition is a source of liberal angst, but Peter Stanford meets the parents proud to give their children an educational advantage
Middle-class parents are increasingly fierce when it comes to their children’s schooling – as report after report has highlighted – pushing with all their might to make sure their offspring get first dibs on whatever educational opportunities are available. Among their favoured strategies, according to new research published last week by the Sutton Trust, is forking out for what it labels a “shadow” army of private tutors, especially in the run-up to crucial public examinations, with nearly a third of children now having private tuition outside school, and wealthier pupils twice as likely to benefit from such extra help as their poorer classmates.
But in Extra Time, the Sutton Trust’s study of a private tuition industry now worth an estimated £2 billion per annum, the social mobility think-tank suggests ability to pay is not necessarily the determining factor in who receives tutoring and who doesn’t. Some sections of the population, it reports, regardless of their financial circumstances, are more prepared than others to go the extra mile and shell out the £20-£30 an hour that the average tutor charges. More than half (56 per cent) of pupils from Asian backgrounds and 42 per cent of black students have private tuition compared with just a quarter of their white classmates.
Pupils like Tamanna Miah, whose Bangladeshi-born parents made large financial sacrifices in order to pay for private tuition so that their daughter, who came to live in Kent when she was six months old, could be the first in their family to go to university. Now 24, she is studying media, communications, politics and government at Canterbury Christ Church University.
“My dad owns his own restaurant and my mother is a housewife,” says Tamanna, the oldest of five children. “We always had the basics we needed, but we’ve never been on holiday, or had family days out, and there were no games consoles. Any spare money went on tutoring. What’s more, I can’t ever remember resenting it. An education is for life, whereas a holiday is just a holiday.”
Tamanna is aware she sounds old for her years, but she believes her approach to education is shaped by an attitude inherited from her parents. Her father only got as far as GCSE level in Bangladesh, while her mother had little education, and is still more comfortable speaking Bengali than English.
“They prize education because they didn’t get the chance of it. So we never had any embarrassment about having tutors,” says Tamanna. “It was, for us, a positive thing.” Her younger sister also had tutoring and is now studying PPE at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
When she was nine, Tamanna recalls going back to live in Bangladesh for a while, where she went to a fee-paying school. “It was chalk boards and slates, wooden tables and chairs, no displays, no technology. If you really want to know why I value education so much, it was because I spent time in that school in Bangladesh. Seeing what it lacked taught me what a huge privilege education is. Most people here just don’t seem to realise that.”
Dr Pragya Agarwal is a researcher at the University of Liverpool and also tutors schoolchildren in maths and sciences at her home in Formby, Lancashire.
“I grew up in India, where a very high value is placed on education. Education comes first in what you spend your money on,” she says.
Which is what Dr Agarwal,
40, did with her own daughter, Prishita, now 19, a talented violinist studying biological anthropology at Cambridge.
“I realised that her statefunded school wasn’t able to support her supplementary needs. If she was going to do really well, she was going to have to learn beyond the curriculum.”
In some subjects, Dr
Agarwal – a graduate in architecture who came from Delhi to Nottingham as a young woman to study for a PhD – did the extra teaching herself, but in others, such as French, she cut back on other household expenditure to pay for a tutor. “My parents had made sacrifices for my education,” she says. “They were determined all three of their daughters should go into professions. It was natural that I should do the same for my daughter.”
She is puzzled by the attitude of many white parents who expect their local hard-pressed state school to take full responsibility for their children’s education. And she can’t understand those mothers and fathers who do resort to a tutor, but try to keep it secret, or are embarrassed by what they are doing.
“They seem to feel that tutoring gives an unfair advantage, or that it’s for the rich to train students for Oxbridge interviews and tests, but a distinction should be made” she says. “Yes, there are people like these but there is also tutoring for families who do not have the advantage of having parents who are educated, or a school that supports a high level of attainment.”
Around 30 per cent of the parents who turn to Nathaniel McCullagh, from the London-based agency Simply Learning Tutors, come from minority ethnic backgrounds, and of those a sizeable proportion make big sacrifices to foot the bill.
“They do it willingly because they know that education is the best route to social mobility,” he says. “Unlike white families, they don’t have other things to fall back on when it comes to their children’s future, no old school tie, or connections, and they are also aware of the prejudice that you can still face because of the colour of your skin. So they see getting the good grades that get you into a good university and a good profession as the only way they can help their childr children achieve status.”
It is a belief that can lead to refreshingly direct conversations, he says. “We have a number of Chinese clients, for instance, who have no liberal angst about getting a private tutor for their children. They look at it very much in terms of costbenefit.” Research quoted in the Sutton Trust report estimates that one-to-one private tuition can equate to a child making as much as five months’ progress, with particularly strong benefits for those who are falling behind in class.
“For them,” continues McCullagh, “it is the most efficient way of helping your children and they have no qualms about talking about how much they are spending.” Likewise, Dr Agarwal has noticed Indian parents feel no inhibitions sharing, even boasting, about paying for this educational advantage. “They don’t understand why they should feel bad or shy about it.”
At the other end of the spectrum is the New Age After School Club, with two branches in north London. Most of the families who use it to help their 7 to 16-year-old children come from the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities. Its tutors teach in small groups to reduce the cost to as little as £7.50 per hour, and tailor timetables around what parents can afford.
“When I came to England, I expected the schools in a country that once ruled the world to be better than those in Ethiopia,” says founder
‘I came to England expecting the schools to be better than those in Ethiopia’
Ensermu Workneh. “Don’t get me wrong. In Ethiopia, parents think education is important. It is in our blood to give a good education to our children, even if we don’t have much money. But Ethiopia is a poor country and that is reflected in its schools.”
However, in the UK he found an approach to learning that meant his daughter wasn’t being stretched. “The teachers would tell me, ‘don’t worry, she’s on the top table’, but she’d only get a single sheet of homework every week. I felt very frustrated, and many of the parents who bring their children to our after-school clubs are frustrated. They want the best, not just good enough.”
Perhaps it comes down to different levels of expectation – among both parents and their children. Dr Agarwal remembers how her daughter would study until the early hours of the morning to finish a piece of school work to the best standard she could. “That is what I would have done when I was her age, but my British husband would worry that she was working too hard. ‘Don’t you feel guilty?’ I remember him asking. I didn’t.”